Pages

Friday, 24 October 2014

This is a painting that the prestigious, World-Renowned Art Critic Brian Sewell labelled 'repellent - a grotesgue medical record'. It's by the 28 year old American artist Aleah Chapin, and with it she won the BP Portrait Award in 2012. Clearly to some minds, a woman is no longer a human being once she is (a) over sixty years of age, and/or (b) naked. I wonder if the model herself had to suffer the hurt and indignity of hearing Sewell's words? I hope not.

I'm reminded of a few responses I had when I started posting female nudes on my Facebook timeline (looking at art has given me increasing happiness over the past year). It really got me thinking, and I realised that subject matter doesn't matter as long as it's truthful. It makes no difference whether an artist paints a landscape, a still life, a building, a village street, an animal (human or otherwise), a rich socialite or a poor labourer, a man or a woman, a person wearing clothes or a person who is naked. It's all life. Art paints life, and often finds beauty where the devourers of fashion magazines do not.

The only reason I tend to share female nudes on Facebook is purely subjective preference. As a heterosexual male, I tend to be more aware of their beauty, so they tend to move me more. Also, many of my favourite artists tended to paint female nudes rather than male. It's true that I find many of them sexy, but I don't respond to them merely with my genitals, as I might if they were porn; instead, they fill my whole body, mind and being with a kind of life-affirming joy. But I can still appreciate the beauty of male bodies, and would be interested and happy to see their portrayal in art posted on my friends' timelines.

Truthful art is not porn (at times the division can be a little fuzzy, but then I would argue that the art in question is not being truthful in the deepest sense; instead, however talented, the artist is helping to perpetuate myths or lies about women - or indeed men!) Likewise, photoshopped fashion images are not art, because they are lying too. They are not depicting life on any level. On the other hand, I find this portrait (and a nude can still be a portrait, as my favourite artist Zinaida Serebriakova showed) touching, beautiful and true to life. It's not a lie. This woman is gorgeous and a real person, and I'm happy to display Aleah Chapin's work of art on my timeline - and on this blog.

I'm also happy to have discovered a still living artist (20 years younger than me!) whose paintings I like. Unless my friends stop following me, of course, I think they'll be seeing more of Chapin's work on my timeline!

Sorry if this reads like a rant, but I feel an ongoing frustration both about the degrading and damaging lies perpetrated by photoshopped nudes, as well as the attitude that regards the female nude in art as inevitably pornographic. I love art that makes me happy (hence Renoir, Sargent and Serebriakova), that makes me feel good about life. This painting does just that.

Friday, 12 September 2014

This is different from anything I’ve posted
previously on this blog. It’s edited from a Facebook status update (on 11
September) that grew and grew – surely the longest I’ve ever shared. Some may
even feel that it’s incompatible with a blog that tends to reflect a Buddhist
(though secular) outlook – I don’t know. I just know that I wanted to share.
I’ve seen and read about so much bloodshed in the past fifteen years. Certainly,
I regard the events of 11th September 2001 as a terrible atrocity.
My heart tells me that, and international law tells me that. But I am tired of
reading those words, ‘Never Forget’, as if the million or more deaths that
followed, supposedly in response to that criminal act, are less important –
less worthy of remembrance. To me, 20th March is the anniversary of
a far bigger tragedy than 9/11, and an even greater crime. So I want to share
the feelings, some of the thoughts behind that remembrance. I also think that
these feelings spring from the same part of me that’s attracted to Buddhist
ethics and practices. I kind of float in and out of Buddhism just as I float in
and out of a very limited form of peace activism. But the source of both in me,
the core values of justice and peace, the horror of bloodshed and inhumanity,
remains constant.

TRIGGER
WARNING: Although I’ve tried not to be gratuitous in
describing the visceral effects of war, there may be passages that would be
traumatic or harmful for some people to read. One particular sentence comes to
mind. It was important to me to express, however briefly, something of the
reality of war, as an antidote to the newspeak through which it is often
presented. Clearly, however, I don’t want my words to hurt anyone, so it’s up
to the reader’s best judgement as to whether to read further.

Thirteen years ago, when the US was attacked
by mostly Saudi Arabian criminals, I tended to see war as something that
happened on the news. I didn't like it, but I didn't feel very personally
involved. By 2003, when mostly American criminals attacked Iraq, I was politicised - and like at least a
million other people in the UK,
I took to the streets.

After becoming chronically ill a year later with neuropathic pain, I spent several years campaigning
against various related War in Terror issues, but mostly the war on Iraq. I had to
give it up eventually because the continuing sense of horror, and the pressures
I was putting on myself, became too much for me and I broke down. But for a
couple of years I kept myself aware and informed, and I felt very emotionally
involved. When people questioned my views I defended them, arguing often and at
great length. I tried to be logical and I knew I was much more knowledgeable
than I'd used to be, but the passion always came through. And of course, I got
nowhere. People who believed in war continued to do so, and my mind didn't
change either.

Now, and especially since Israel's latest barbaric assaults on Gaza, I feel like I can
hardly be bothered to discuss it. I've seen and read about so much insanity,
cruelty and horror, that I don't have much respect left for the views of people
who defend, say, the Iraq War, or Israel's slaughter of the Palestinians. I
even find it a bit difficult to want to stay friends with people who espouse
such views. I know, of course, that they have a moral and legal right to
express them, and much of my peace activism was concerned with defending the
right to free speech. I know that it's a fact of life that my friends and I
aren't going to agree on everything, and that in some ways this is a good
thing. But increasingly, I seem to have no respect for pro-war views. I mean,
for frack's sake, have people never heard of international law, or the UN
Charter???

International law is meant to protect all of us
from the chaos, the slaughter and the 'scourge of war'. The UN Charter permits
going to war only in very rare and desperate circumstances. It's not okay, for
instance, to respond to terrorist attacks by fighting a war that causes
suffering and death to millions of people who had nothing to do with those
attacks. That simply trashes the memory of the victims of 9/11 in the worst way
imaginable. And international humanitarian law declares that in those rare
circumstances where war is necessary, it's a crime to target civilians or civilian
infrastructure, no matter what the reason or provocation. It is never, ever
okay to not discriminate between a military enemy and innocent civilians. It is
never, never, NEVER okay to murder children!

In reality, and increasingly it seems, war never
follows the rules laid out in the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions. It
sometimes seems to have good intentions, but those are almost always based on
lies, lies used to justify wars that shouldn't even be taking place. And no
military, anywhere, seems to translate international humanitarian law into
practice. Whole suburbs or even towns are flattened in order to kill a few
terrorists. In the case of Iraq,
a whole country was virtually destroyed. Large parts of Gaza
look like Hiroshima after the bomb, and little
Palestinian girls are decapitated (aren't we supposed to be better than ISIS?), disembowelled or, in one photograph that I can't
forget, have the back half of their skulls blown off. Sometimes the military
gets its man (and sometimes not), but it often takes a hundred or a thousand
more people with him. Some estimates suggest that a million Iraqi people died
as a direct result of the 2003 invasion. Women get killed. Old people with
dementia get killed. Children get killed. Babies get killed. It's a wonder that
every single person in those countries doesn't hate us. It would be
understandable if they did.

I'm sick and tired of it. I'm sick of nice, sane,
friendly people defending war in terms of 'security' or 'freedom'. War as it is
fought today is obscene. It is streets filled with burning flesh, blood and
intestines. It is real people, REAL CHILDREN, screaming in fear and pain. It is
never fought with good cause, and is never conducted in as way that protects
innocent people and adheres to international law. There is no such thing as a
‘surgical strike’ - the war on Gaza
demonstrates that. War is terrible, unjust suffering inflicted on human beings
by other human beings. It is sick and evil and it can almost never be
justified. The pilots who brought down the World Trade Centre thirteen years
ago were criminals, not an army! The
fact that something needed to be done did not mean it was okay to invade,
occupy and flatten countries. It's never remotely okay to kill children, no
matter what the provocation.

I can no longer feel bothered to argue with people.
Anyone who thinks these atrocities are justified by 9/11 is either ignorant,
unaware or has no moral centre left. People justify Israel's actions in the last few
months even though 500 children were killed, and thousands more injured,
hundreds of thousands displaced, orphaned or traumatised. I don't even want to
speculate about the number of kids killed in Iraq
or Afghanistan.
And I am losing tolerance for people who defend these things. It’s not as if
the UN Charter and Geneva Conventions aren't available online for everyone to
see!

Rest in peace, all you thousands of victims of
9/11. Rest in peace, all you millions of people who suffered in the subsequent
War on Terror. Slaughtered civilians everywhere, your lives are all equal, even
though it is constantly implied that they aren't. Your deaths aren't
'regrettable but justified' - they are terrible, wicked crimes.

I’m aware that I need to find a calmer, more ‘Buddhist’ place in me that can
respond to these matters in a more centred way. But this is how I felt on 11th
September 2014. This is my 9/11 piece for this
year.

Monday, 24 March 2014

Lately I’ve been enjoying a film and a book, very
different in character yet united by a common theme. The film is the animated
comedy ‘Fantastic Mr Fox’, directed by Wes Anderson and based on the story by
Road Dahl. The book is called ‘Prodigal Summer’ by Barbara Kingsolver, and
although it’s a novel it cleverly integrates a lot of science, in a way that it
always remains a part of the story rather than as an ‘expository lump’. I’m not
a scientist, but Kingsolver is, and in this book one of her main characters is
concerned with the role of predators in ecosystems. She studies coyotes.

This character, the aptly named Deanna Wolfe, tries
passionately to explain to her lover, a farmer who hunts coyotes, why predators
are more important to an environment than prey animals. In an ecosystem, there
are relatively few ‘top predators’, such as bears and wolves, but lots of prey
animals, from deer to mice and squirrels. Shooting most or all of the local top
predators can have devastating effects beyond the loss of a single noble
species, because the prey animals then multiply. Squashing spiders causes flies
to increase; killing foxes can cause a plague of rabbits that eat the farmer’s
carrots. The increase of the top predator’s natural prey can also crowd out
other species, causing their extinction. Often we cannot predict the effects of
wiping out a predator population, but it will nearly always cause problems for
a previously stable ecosystem.

Deanna has written a thesis which attempts to explain why
the wily coyote, despite being the ‘most despised animal’ in the United States,
killed in hundreds of thousands every year (a horrible statistic), actually
increases in numbers when it’s hunted. Something happens to their breeding. It
may be that when their population is under threat, all of the females in a pack
start to breed, instead of just the alpha female. Or perhaps something hormonal
causes bigger litters. Either way, the efforts of farmers to protect their
lambs seems to make the problem worse. Mothers, fathers, pups are killed for
nothing – except for money: the annual ‘coyote bounty’.

This got me thinking about foxes. Here in a UK, a lot of
people love foxes, but a lot of people hate them. This hatred and distrust has
been coded in tradition (partly through ritualistic and cruel aristocratic
‘sport’) for centuries. They kill our chickens! farmers rage. They raid our
wheelie bins! townies complain. This hatred is pointless, because there’s
nothing to hate; it’s just a focus for people’s frustration, a scapegoating. In
a touching scene in ‘Fantastic Mr Fox’, Mrs Fox (rather sexily voiced by Meryl
Streep) asks her husband, “Why did you lie to me, when you promised you’d never
go raiding the farmer’s birds again?” Mr Fox (a characterful George Clooney)
replies regretfully that he doesn’t know. “I’m a wild animal”, is all he can
say. And of course, that’s right. How can we hate an animal for doing what it
can’t help? Foxes just do what they do. They can’t make a choice to do
something else.

In the British countryside and towns, foxes are the top
predator. They are often called pests by angry homeowners, but they are not
pests. By preying on rats, mice, even insects, they help keep down pest
numbers. They do us a great service. True, they also kill birds, just like our
lovable moggies do. But the RSPB insists that the decline of garden birds has
more to do with our own effects on the ecosystem than with predation by cats
and foxes. As so often, foxes are scapegoated for our own failings.

Going back to the fictional Deanna’s thesis, I wondered if
foxes also breed differently when they’re hunted. Who knows? – it may or may
not be. But when culls have been tried in the past, they’ve always failed.
Killing foxes in towns costs a lot of public money (which surely we can ill afford),
yet despite the killings, foxes maintain a fairly stable population. Numbers
don’t increase, but they stay roughly the same. It seems that foxes from the
countryside or other town areas simply move into spaces left available by
cullings, glad of the opportunities provided. Foxes are a wonderfully adaptable
species, and we punish them for that adaptability, viewing it suspiciously as
cleverness, slyness or cunning. Once again, this is scapegoating; foxes are too
like us humans, the most adaptable mammal species on the planet. And we make
them pay – but for nothing, it seems, than enjoyment, sport or revenge. Yes,
some predators can be wiped out, and
their loss is devastating beyond their extinction as a single species. But
foxes’ numbers remain the same; coyotes’ actually increase. By killing them, we
cause blood and suffering, and the starvation of cubs, all for nothing.

‘Fantastic Mr Fox’ ends with the foxes and other animals, having been
persecuted throughout the film by the farmers, making a new home underneath a
supermarket owned by the same farmers. Adaptable to the end, they have lost
their home in the hill under the beautiful tree, but have made a new life where
they can raid an unlimited supply of food every night. ‘Destroy’ them in one
place, and they pop up in another. Mr Fox is fantastic indeed!

There’s no question whose side the film is on. It celebrates the wit, the
audacity, the adaptability, and the cunning, of the fox. As we should do. And
that goes for the wily coyote as well. We may have to put up with nuisances
from both species, but hating them is just silly, and we need them too.

Follow by Email

About Me

2500 years ago, the dying Buddha said, "Be a light unto yourself, be a refuge for yourself. Take yourself to no external refuge." Recently, after years of chronic pain and anxiety, I've been searching for the place inside all of us which Tara Brach calls our 'true refuge' - the aware and compassionate space that lets us know we can handle whatever difficulties life brings. I'm hoping this blog will reflect that search. My interests include photography, nature and wildlife (especially foxes!), reading, music - and travelling, when I'm well enough. Please feel free to comment! All photos are mine unless otherwise credited.